Summer's Solace
by chakramrain
Summary: Spring is all anew and winter is the holocaust. That is, unless Katie Fitch is spring and Effy Stonem is winter, because then spring would be the excessive obsession with renewing the cracked of a regretted past and winter would be indifference. Neither fit when both meet in the sliver of time between summer and fall. The rendezvous doesn't last but the solace is worthwhile.


If Katie were the sun, Effy would be the full moon, the galleon coasting through turbulent waters. If Katie were spring from her bright malice, Effy would be winter or autumn, bare and naked in every sense of the words. Then again, if Katie were fire Effy would be ice. But that's not how the story goes, because Katie is only as much of the sun as she is a paper cut-out of reality. She's the set on a musical, swinging in as a wooden piece for setting the scene and moving away without offering much of real heat radiating.

The opposite of passion is never hate, because hate is always passionate. And Effy is not nearing passionate with love, but Katie has always had an oscillating high with hatred. And they only fell like this on a summer day, as if the meadow's surrounding flora and fauna would keep the real world away for just a few months, letting them view the world through some panoramic perspective and shimmering lens. For once Katie is hardly passionate and Effy is alight, ends and edges asunder with burning desire. Katie is partial in comparison, toes pointed as she fears for her life. Effy, however, is ready to take the plunge, harness present or not.

Effy trudges through the winter that has settled in her leather boots, making awful noises and snow crunching beneath her heavy steps. She doesn't have a coat, because she'll be going somewhere slightly warmer. Katie moves through spring, shielding her eyes from everything new and beautiful and stopping to flick dewdrops off bunnies. She isn't the queen of winter; she's the wicked witch of the west in spring and she moves somewhere less humid and thick.

They meet halfway at a party and all is silent and less painful than imagined. Getting through thickets, bushes of thorns and overhanging branches have been tasks but the eventual quiet nullifies everything. Effy is insistent with her stance.

Fingertips and their following knuckles are thin, but they caress with a cold that causes Katie to shake in a transient bout of tremors. A chin takes a head of warm brown underneath itself just as it did previously with a head of blazing red and Effy admits her preference for the mellower brown. They're somewhere between summer and autumn, where the leaves fall, revealing their spines to the world in piles and the eager creeks swallow eager humans.

This is a phenomenon that occurs once yearly if both princesses pass their tests and piece their broken selves together for one perfect reunion where fractures and fissures are filled with plaster and wet clay. And in this summery place they look fine in mirrors, but they don't know because they haven't felt the need to look at all.

"No one has to know," Effy says, because she previously longed to hear those words from another's dry lips.

They do things right this time, because it's different and everything finally falls into place. The growths in Katie's skin fill the lacking, hollowed areas in Effy's body and as they join, they form a pretty picture they have not witnessed from an outsider's eyes.

Every touch and every stroke finds its way into a welcoming embrace. Instead of the powerful, headstrong advance, Katie tucks her chin inwards and almost falls into a puddle behind her. Instead of standing and waiting, Effy steps forward twice and catches her opposing from falling. When lips join the lightning is alive in the woven tapestry of white in the sky.

In this castle in the clouds no one has sweeping to do and everyone forgets the guilt, the pain and the cutting sorrows they'll meet again individually later. Both assume the magic ends in other seasons and their own.

When Katie turns to face a brightening spring splashing flamboyantly in her face and Effy takes the handshake of another freezing winter that follows the previous, the hearts shatter and convince themselves they'll never be repaired.

And yet the need for some kind of industrial glue is suppressed when both meet again annually for winter. And Katie wishes Effy'd hold her in the rains under trees and kiss her when the streams of water slide down her shirts. She hopes to pick every flower she doesn't know the name of and admit it, too. She wants to learn to toss her body from tree to tree, because she's told herself Effy does it all the time, but she doesn't actually know, because neither speak about their own seasons within summer or autumn, a haven of rendezvous.

Effy wants to put out her tongue to catch snowflakes and not look like a complete idiot. She prays she'll find solace in a burrow with Katie and hibernate all day when she can. Effy wants to break off every branch and pretend she's in Hogwarts or possibly build a fort. But she knows she wouldn't need one if Katie'd been there to wrap her in armour.

"Don't make me come, Katie."

"Please don't."

On the other hand, both are fearful that their abodes will be messed, cracked and pained, just as their souls are. Spring tells of a regretted past in its excessive need to make viewable things new. Winter tells of the most crushing of all: indifference, the true opposite of passion and Effy doesn't fit, somehow.

But neither tries and both begin to run faster as they feel approaching cold.

"I love you."

"And so do I."

But it cannot last, and it will not.

They meet once annually, in summer and autumn. They meet when they can, in houses where no one is but them. They throw the alcohol away and stamp out every light and hold each other until they bleed happiness and the happiness somehow seems shameful. But nothing feels shameful and perhaps winter and spring may just feel perfectly alright.

But until then they meet once and they meet in summer. It's a summer fling and summer flings never last.

**AN: Another 'Keffy' one-shot, the first being 'Just the Redhead'. I took this with a slant of poetry. Thanks for reading.**

**-chakramrain**


End file.
